With the rapid development of communications technologies and their applications, a communication-based positioning technology has attracted increasing attentions. User position information is a basis for many innovative value-added services and applications, for example, a positioning technology may be applied to refined optimization and problem analysis of a wireless network, or applied to fields such as security protection, targeted advertisement push, and navigation. Generally, a current positioning technology is two-dimensional (2D) positioning in the horizontal dimension of the outdoor ground. Commonly used methods are a feature matching method based on a wireless signal feature, a hyperbolic method based on latency, and the like. By using conventional 2D positioning based on a wireless communication signal, an indoor user cannot be accurately distinguished from an outdoor user, and an indoor user cannot be positioned in a dimension of height either. However, statistics in the industry show that more than 70% of voice services and more than 80% of data services occur indoors, and therefore, indoor positioning for a user has great significance.
A commonly used positioning technology, such as positioning by using Global Positioning System (GPS), is to position a terminal by using a navigation satellite; however, due to blocking and attenuation caused by an indoor environment to a GPS signal, indoor positioning cannot be performed. Some commonly used indoor positioning methods, such as 3D Wi-Fi indoor positioning, are to position a user by using multiple Wi-Fi access points deployed indoors. A major deficiency of Wi-Fi indoor positioning lies in its poor scene adaptability, that is, corresponding positioning can be performed only in a building or a floor in which Wi-Fi is deployed. However, in reality, no Wi-Fi is deployed in most buildings or some floors of a building, and therefore, 3D indoor positioning cannot be performed in these scenes.
Therefore, currently, it is impossible to implement high-accuracy 3D indoor positioning with strong scene adaptability to accurately determine a horizontal position at which a to-be-positioned terminal is located indoors and a height at which the terminal is located, which limits application for an innovative value-added service based on user position information.